Join the Guatemala Accompaniment Project
............................................................................................

What We've Accomplished!

In communities, courtrooms and public protests, NISGUA’s presence in Guatemala has enabled activists to advance their work more publically and effectively than they could without accompaniment. Our specific accomplishments include:

• Guatemala Accompaniment Project (G.A.P) staff has trained and placed more than 145 human rights monitors in returned refugee and internally displaced communities, with human rights organizations, and with genocide survivors since the project first began in 1995.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS 2004-2009

• Since 2004, G.A.P. has accompanied well over 70 cases involving at-risk defenders, including covering long-term needs in over 20 communities whose members are involved in the historic genocide cases.
• In the last five years, accompaniers have published nearly 30 articles in 10 local and national media sources on the issues of entrenched impunity and mega-development. View a sampling of accompaniers' published articles here. 

• We have successfully intergrated environmental, socio-economic, and indigenous rights into our monitoring work. In 2008-09 alone, we placed accompaniers with indigenous groups in the San Marcos region opposed to open-pit mining; communities in the Ixcán opposed to the Xalalá dam; a Chorti Maya association fighting the privatization of a local forest; and local leaders in Coatepeque organizing communities around issues of food security and access to water. 

• We have provided international observation to numerous community consultations across the country in which local indigenous populations resoundingly rejected oil exploration, open-pit mining and dam mega-projects.

• We played a central role in expanding the mandate of the umbrella international accompaniment organization, ACOGUATE, to include accompanying those who are at risk for their work defending social, economic, and cultural rights, especially as they relate to natural resource extraction. NISGUA’s accompaniment related to natural resource development in the Ixcán has served as a model that is being replicated in other regions.

• Due to heightened security concerns around the visit of the Spanish investigative commission to Guatemala in June-July 2006 (see information about the Guatemalan genocide case before the Spanish courts for background), G.A.P. mobilized sponsoring communities to support four former accompaniers to return to Guatemala to provide "emergency accompaniment" to communities and individuals under threat. 

ACCOMPLISHMENTS 2000-2003

• Responding to a request from massacre survivors, in 2000 we began expanding our accompaniment work to cover nearly 20 communities of survivors and eyewitnesses who risk their lives by charging former Guatemalan dictators Efraín Ríos Montt and Romeo Lucas García along with their military high commands with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

• As the human rights situation in Guatemala declined under the 2000-2004 FRG administration and Guatemalan social justice organizations suffered an increasing level of threats and attacks, city-based activists asked for international accompaniment. NISGUA responded by forming a two-person Organization Accompaniment team in 2001 which has accompanied forensic anthropologists at exhumation sites, lawyers and witnesses in precedent-setting legal cases, as well as a number of prominent human rights organizations.

• In 2000, when the UN threatened to pull its human rights monitoring mission out of Guatemala, NISGUA accompaniment volunteers gathered testimonies from rural communities affected by political violence. These declarations, which were submitted to the UN, attested to the communities’ profound desire for a continued UN presence. As a result of our efforts, along with those of our colleagues, the UN’s mandate was extended for an additional three years.
  

• In 2002, twelve years after the stabbing of Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack, three intellectual authors of her assassination were brought to trial. The Myrna Mack Foundation requested an extraordinary level of accompaniment during the legal processes against the highest ranking military officials to ever face trial in Guatemala for human rights issues. NISGUA responded with two full-time accompaniers for the six-week-long process, as well as a number of shorter-term accompaniers from Sponsoring Communities and U.S.-based NISGUA staff.